ready for him.  But the time is coming when everybody will know something about every thing.  How can one have the illustrated magazines, the “Popular Science Monthly,” the Psychological journals, the theological periodicals, books on all subjects, forced on his attention, in their own persons, so to speak, or in the reviews which analyze and pass judgment upon them, without getting some ideas which belong to many provinces of human intelligence?  The air we breathe is made up of four elements, at least:  oxygen, nitrogen, carbonic acid gas, and knowledge.  There is something quite delightful to witness in the absorption and devotion of a genuine specialist.  There is a certain sublimity in that picture of the dying scholar in Browning’s “A Grammarian’s Funeral:”—­

  “So with the throttling hands of death at strife,
     Ground he at grammar;
   Still, through the rattle, parts of speech were rife;
     While he could stammer
   He settled Hoti’s business—­let it be—­
     Properly based Oun
   Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De,
     Dead from the waist down.”

A genuine enthusiasm, which will never be satisfied until it has pumped the well dry at the bottom of which truth is lying, always excites our interest, if not our admiration.

One of the pleasantest of our American writers, whom we all remember as Ik Marvel, and greet in his more recent appearance as Donald Grant Mitchell, speaks of the awkwardness which he feels in offering to the public a “panoramic view of British writers in these days of specialists,—­when students devote half a lifetime to the analysis of the works of a single author, and to the proper study of a single period.”

He need not have feared that his connected sketches of “English Lands, Letters and Kings” would be any less welcome because they do not pretend to fill up all the details or cover all the incidents they hint in vivid outline.  How many of us ever read or ever will read Drayton’s “Poly-Olbion?” Twenty thousand long Alexandrines are filled with admirable descriptions of scenery, natural productions, and historical events, but how many of us in these days have time to read and inwardly digest twenty thousand Alexandrine verses?  I fear that the specialist is apt to hold his intelligent reader or hearer too cheap.  So far as I have observed in medical specialties, what he knows in addition to the knowledge of the well-taught general practitioner is very largely curious rather than important.  Having exhausted all that is practical, the specialist is naturally tempted to amuse himself with the natural history of the organ or function he deals with; to feel as a writing-master does when he sets a copy,—­not content to shape the letters properly, but he must add flourishes and fancy figures, to let off his spare energy.

I am beginning to be frightened.  When I began these papers, my idea was a very simple and innocent one.  Here was a mixed company, of various conditions, as I have already told my readers, who came together regularly, and before they were aware of it formed something like a club or association.  As I was the patriarch among them, they gave me the name some of you may need to be reminded of; for as these reports are published at intervals, you may not remember the fact that I am what The Teacups have seen fit to call The Dictator.